Lesson plan template on the official plan-book fields, with examples

Definition

Lesson plan: A lesson plan is the page you write before you teach. It says what students should be able to do by the end, how you'll spend the period, and how you'll know they got there. Teachers keep it in the official lesson-planning book their ministry issues, which many of them simply call the preparation book.

In Jordan you can draft here and copy straight into your book without renaming a thing, since we kept the book's fields in the book's order. US teachers will know most of them by other names (objectives, prior knowledge, materials, procedures, assessment, reflection). Two may be new: links to earlier and later grades, and links to other lessons and subjects in the same grade.

The fields, and how to fill in each one

The field names and their order follow the ministry's planning book, as printed in a 2014 copy of the form. Check them against the book your school gave you, and go with the book where they differ. The Arabic column copies the form exactly.

The Time column has to add up to the period (or periods, if the lesson runs longer). Our example leaves out the strategy and tool numbers, so take those from your own book's list.

We skipped the book's cover page and daily follow-up table (جدول المتابعة اليومي), which belong to the whole book, and added an optional homework line for forms like Oman's that put homework in the plan.

Where the research fits inside the fields

The ministry's fields tell you what to write down. They don't say how to run the lesson. Most of what we put in them comes from Barak Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction (American Educator, spring 2012), plus two ideas from Wiliam and Gonzalez.

In one maths study Rosenshine reports, the most effective teachers spent about 23 minutes of a 40-minute period on lecture, demonstration, questioning and working examples. The least effective spent only 11 minutes presenting new material. He never sets a lesson order or a minute-by-minute split, though, and nor does the ministry's form. The 5, 10, 10, 15 and 5 in our example are our own call. Move them around.

The decision point comes from his principle on success rates, where he puts the best rate at about 80 percent. If fewer than about 8 in 10 guided-practice answers are right, reteach before students work alone.

We took the exit card from Dylan Wiliam's Classroom Assessment: Minute by Minute, Day by Day in Educational Leadership (November 2005). Students answer your question on an index card and hand it in as they leave. He calls it an exit pass (most US teachers say exit ticket). It can be what he calls range-finding, a question that helps you judge where to start tomorrow.

Our fill order is from Jennifer Gonzalez's How to Write a Lesson Plan on Cult of Pedagogy, which credits Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design. Measurable objectives first, then the assessment that measures them, and only then the lessons. She's describing a whole unit, so using it for one lesson is our adaptation. On our sheet that's outcomes, then assessment, then prior learning, procedures and materials.

Filled-in examples from maths, science and Arabic

The first example is a Grade 6 maths lesson on adding fractions with unlike denominators, with every field filled in. Two shorter ones follow, from science and Arabic, showing the fields that change from lesson to lesson. The titles are ours, so copy the real unit and lesson titles from your textbook. We've assumed a 45-minute period. If yours is longer or shorter, keep the same proportions.

We left the first two reflection boxes empty on purpose, because they're for during and after the lesson and we've no lesson of our own to report. The extension problems sit in the procedures instead of a third outcome, because you can't check an outcome only some students attempt.

How to fill in the harder fields

Specific outcomes

Write each outcome as a verb you can see, what it acts on and the condition, as in “adds two fractions with different denominators by finding a common denominator”. Skip understands and knows. You can't watch either one happen. The form counts attitudes as outcomes too, so appreciates is fine if it's something students say or do. Number the outcomes so each procedure and assessment points back to one.

Assessment strategy and tool

The form wants both boxes filled. The strategy is how you gather evidence. The tool is what you record it on. The ministry's booklet on assessment strategies and tools names five strategies (performance-based assessment, communication, self-review, observation, pen-and-paper) and five tools. Those are a checklist, a rating scale, a verbal rating scale, a learning log and an anecdotal record, which is a short note of what a student did and in what situation.

A verbal rating scale describes each level of performance in a few words. US teachers would call it something close to a rubric (see our rubric guide).

Procedures and time

Cut the new content into small steps with a short task after each, and for every step write what students do as well as what you do, with its minutes and outcome number. Put the decision point in beforehand. Mid-lesson, it's easier to follow a decision than to make one.

Prior learning

List what the lesson depends on (concepts, skills, facts or rules) and write your review questions straight from that list. Then a gap shows up in the first five minutes instead of halfway through the worked example.

Three common mistakes in the fields, and how to avoid them

An outcome you can't check

“Students understand adding fractions” gives you nothing to look for on an exit card. Which answer would show they've got there? If you can't say, rewrite it with a verb you can see, such as adds or writes. Then you can write the exit question straight from it.

A strategy with no tool, or a tool with no strategy

Write observation and stop there, and you reach the end of the period with nothing on paper to go back to. Checklist on its own has the opposite gap. It doesn't say how you'll fill it in.

Procedures that only describe you

If every row starts with “the teacher explains”, the plan says nothing about what students do for 45 minutes. A close cousin is a Time column that adds up to more than the period, so the last procedure gets cut, and in our example that's the exit card.

If your form isn't Jordan's

Oman's ministry has an official electronic lesson-preparation form, issued in March 2024. For Egypt we found no official form, just a template site that lists the usual columns, so treat that column as common practice. We found no Saudi form at all. The sheet still works there, where outcomes are called نواتج التعلم. Grade, unit title and lesson title look much the same on Oman's form, so the table leaves them out.

Oman's form also has boxes for enrichment and remedial activities and for individualised learning. Our sheet doesn't, so put those in the procedures, as the example does with its extension problems.

Written with String's editorial team: we use AI for research and first drafts, and a person checks every fact and every source before anything is published. How we write